A Culture of Deniability

Not an Isolated Incident

The use of RNC e-mail by White House staffers is apparently is not entirely unusual.

Also in Tuesday's document dump was a Jan. 8, 2007 e-mail from Steve Bell, the chief of staff to Sen. Pete Domenici, about the senator's preferred replacement for fired U.S. attorney David Iglesias. Bell sent that e-mail to three people -- including one "kr@georgewbush.com".

I wonder who that was.

I called Bell this morning to get a sense of whether the official and political e-mail addresses of White House aides are widely considered to be interchangeable.

"I don't know how they . . . I don't know which is . . . I'm not going to comment on it," Bell said.

And consider this: copies of e-mails between now-convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Susan Ralston, then an assistant to Karl Rove, showed her using a variety of e-mail addresses at georgewbush.com, rnchq.com and aol.com.

Cover-Up Exposed?

Will this be the nail in Gonzales's coffin?

Murray Waas writes today for the National Journal: "Shortly before Attorney General Alberto Gonzales advised President Bush last year on whether to shut down a Justice Department inquiry regarding the administration's warrantless domestic eavesdropping program, Gonzales learned that his own conduct would likely be a focus of the investigation, according to government records and interviews. . . .

"Bush personally intervened to sideline the Justice Department probe in April 2006 by taking the unusual step of denying investigators the security clearances necessary for their work. . . .

"Sources familiar with the halted inquiry said that if the probe had been allowed to continue, it would have examined Gonzales's role in authorizing the eavesdropping program while he was White House counsel, as well as his subsequent oversight of the program as attorney general."

Waas writes that it isn't clear if Bush knew Gonzales was a potential target of the probe when he intervened. But either way, this is ugly.

If Gonzales told the president he wanted the probe quashed because he himself was in the crosshairs, then you've potentially got Bush personally involved in a cover-up to help his friend. If Gonzales didn't tell Bush that he was a potential target, then the attorney general may have abused his office and misled the president.